The Free Schedule Inside Hot Springs' Three-Festival Weekend
At 6 p.m. this Thursday, an ostrich-themed fun run starts on Convention Boulevard. Over the next two and a half hours, a roots singer, a bird caller, and a string band follow it onto the Bridge Street LIVE stage. All of it is part of the Birding Festival of the South, which has sold out its passes, and all of it is free to attend.
Three festivals overlap in Hot Springs this week. The inaugural Birding Festival of the South runs October 8 through 10. The 35th Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival opens October 9 and runs through October 17. The Hot Springs Water Festival fills Arlington Lawn on Saturday, October 10. Each one has a ticketed core. The birding festival and the Water Festival also have a free public schedule that covers a wide stretch of downtown: Bridge Street on Thursday night, then Hollywood Park, Arlington Lawn, and a record shop inside the Arlington on Saturday.
The Birding Festival of the South is based at the Hot Springs Convention Center, 134 Convention Boulevard, and Oaklawn Hot Springs is the presenting sponsor. The event listing from Visit Hot Springs says festival passes are sold out and that field trips, workshops, and presentations are for passholders only. Many of those pass-only field trips go to places locals already know well, like Garvan Woodland Gardens, Lake Catherine State Park, the Northwoods Trails, and the Hot Springs Greenway Trail.
Thursday evening is open to everyone. The festival's public schedule for October 8 runs in this order:
Friday's birding program is for pass holders only. The public schedule picks back up on Saturday, as covered below.
The film festival opens Friday, October 9, with Penny Lane's Wild Inside at Oaklawn's Event Center. The closing film, Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu, also shows at Oaklawn, on October 16. Everything else in the festival, screenings and events alike, happens at the Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa, 239 Central Avenue.
So Oaklawn sits behind two of this week's festivals. It is the presenting sponsor of the birding festival, and its event center hosts the film festival's opening and closing nights. The documentary festival's daily screenings stay at the Arlington on Central Avenue. The two big nights take place a few miles south, at the racetrack.
Here is how the stretch lays out by date and location:
| Date | Event | Location | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thu, Oct 8 | Birding fun run and Bridge Street LIVE | Convention Blvd.; Bridge Street | Free and open to the public |
| Fri, Oct 9 | HSDFF opening night, Wild Inside | Oaklawn Event Center | See the festival website |
| Sat, Oct 10 | Hot Springs Water Festival | Arlington Lawn | Free, no registration |
| Sat, Oct 10 | Birding Origami | Hollywood Park | Free and open to the public |
| Sat, Oct 10 | Steam City Records multimedia event | Steam City Records in the Arlington Hotel | Free and open to the public |
| Oct 10–13 | HSDFF Filmmaker Retreat | Festival program | For filmmakers |
| Oct 12–13 | HSDFF Filmmaker Forum | Festival program | Industry conference |
| Tue, Oct 13 | HSDFF centerpiece, The Other Side of Memory | Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa | See the festival website |
| Fri, Oct 16 | HSDFF closing night, Bob and David Climb Machu Picchu | Oaklawn Event Center | See the festival website |
The Sentinel-Record reports that film festival passes and the full schedule are on the festival's own website. The coverage we read doesn't give pass prices or say whether single-screening tickets are sold. Check the festival site directly before you plan an evening around a particular film.
Saturday has the most free events of the three days, and they start on the lawn in front of the Arlington.
The National Park Service hosts the Water Festival, and its 2026 announcement says it is free and family-friendly, with no tickets or registration. The schedule includes music, demonstrations, interactive booths, and craft activities. There is also a spring-water tasting competition, and the public votes on the winner. The conservation partners listed are the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, Mystic Ozark, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Friends of Hot Springs National Park.
The two sources give different end times. The Sentinel-Record's preview lists 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Park Service release says it runs until 2:30 p.m. If you're coming in the afternoon for the tasting vote, plan to arrive before 2.
The birding festival's free schedule starts back up that afternoon. Birding Origami runs from 1 to 2 p.m. at Hollywood Park and is listed as free and open to the public. That night, Steam City Records inside the Arlington Hotel hosts a multimedia event called "Bird is the Word: A Fashion Flash," also free and open to the public. One part of the listing gives the start time as 9 p.m. and another gives 9:30 p.m.
The same listing names a few more Saturday events that don't need a birding pass but do need a separate ticket from the host. There's an Early Bird Woodland Walk and a Birder's Watercolor Class at Garvan Woodland Gardens, and Science Saturdays: Bird Beak Adaptations at Mid-America Science Museum.
Saturday is also the first day of the film festival's inaugural Filmmaker Retreat. The four-day program, run with Indie Media Arts South, is for documentary makers based in the Mid-South and South.
After the weekend the birding crowd heads home, and downtown is mostly back to the documentary festival and its regulars. This year's program has more new pieces than usual. The Filmmaker Forum is in its fourth year and runs October 12 and 13 as a two-day industry conference. The festival is adding a Documentary Roundtable, co-presented with Deadline. Executive Director Ken Jacobson called it the festival's "exciting new entry into the Oscar competition space." Darlene Love is this year's honorary chair.
The program leans on history, and Jacobson connects that to the calendar:
"In this, our 35th year — also the 150th anniversary of Hot Springs, and the 250th birthday of the USA — we proudly use this occasion to embrace history."
That approach shows in the lineup Deadline published. There's a 30th-anniversary screening of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, and the festival will show all 16 one-hour chapters of Mark Cousins' The Story of Documentary Film. Two-time Academy Award winner Ben Proudfoot will record a live podcast after a screening of his Netflix short The Baddest Speechwriter of All. He'll be joined by Michael Merrill and Jacobson, who host "Top Docs." The lineup also includes new work from Barbara Kopple, Ron Howard, Sam Pollard, and Liz Garbus.
The centerpiece, Nick Capezzera's The Other Side of Memory, screens at the Arlington on October 13. Jacobson's quote is the only city 150th tie-in we could confirm for this stretch. Our sources didn't list any separate sesquicentennial events in town this fall.
A Thursday concert that starts at 8:20 p.m. and a Saturday event at the Arlington that starts at 9 p.m. or later mean some people will be driving home after dark. If you live out toward Lake Hamilton, ARDOT has a resurfacing project on Highway 7 between Grand Avenue and the Lake Hamilton Bridge. It brings night lane closures from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. The closures began September 27, and ARDOT expects the project to take about two months. All of this week's festival nights fall inside that window, so a late drive south on Highway 7 will likely mean a single lane through the work zone. You can check the ARDOT notice for the latest on the project.
If one of the speakers at the Water Festival gets you thinking about the springs, the creeks, or the land you own around Garland County, the team at Rita Smith brings forestry, appraisal, and land management experience to those conversations. Contact us whenever you'd like to talk it through.
When we assist you with buying or selling, we evaluate the property and your goal as if they were our own. It’s really that simple – doing business the way it used to be done.
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